There’s a moment every comp leader will recognize, like a familiar scene from a movie:

[Interior, office, daytime...] We see a senior leader at their desk, scrutinizing the data for a missed quarter... a segment underperformed. Attrition has spiked. The senior leader looks up from the data, shakes their head and quietly utters: “We need to fix the comp plan.”

Once again, sales compensation then takes the blame for everything the organization didn’t see (or didn't want to look at) upstream that quarter.

In the latest episode of The Sales Compensation Show podcast, Nabeil Alazzam sat down with Kaleb Carter, Director of Sales Compensation – FP&A at Trustpilot, for a conversation that articulates an emerging truth many senior comp and RevOps leaders feel, but sometimes struggle to articulate org-wide cleanly: comp isn’t just a pay mechanism. It’s the behavioral and economic architecture of the GTM system.

Kaleb has strong experience in this area, and calls for a reframe of the function: from back office “administration” to strategic design. He advocates for a function that's rooted in systems thinking, governance, and performance realism.  

If your comp team wants more influence (and fewer fire drills), this episode is the perfect thing to queue up. Check it out on Spotify, Apple, or below on YouTube:

Episode resources

• Connect with Kaleb—a founding member of our Sales Comp Think Tank— on LinkedIn  
• Book recommendation: Kim Scott’s Radical Candor  
• Peter Drucker (management thinker influencing Kaleb’s leadership philosophy)

Below, we've rounded up the most actionable takeaways from Kaleb (even if you can't watch the episode right now).

Far more than payroll processors, comp teams are architects of behavior

As Kaleb’s navigated his career, one belief has only gotten stronger: incentive compensation has emerged as one of the most strategic roles in the business.

While a lot of teams talk about “aligning incentives,” Kaleb goes even further and argues the comp function should help shape the system that creates incentives in the first place. Additionally, the function should be evaluated by how durable and predictable they can make the revenue engine.

According to Kaleb, comp earns trusted-advisor status today not by saying “here’s the plan,” but by becoming the counsel for better decisions from a vantage point that touches every function.

Kaleb believes you've reached “good architecture” for comp when you’ve fully aligned:

• what the business wants,
• what leaders are directing,
• what the org actually enables,
• and what sellers actually do day-to-day.

He describes the modern comp leader as an architect of behavior; someone designing the entire economic environment reps operate in. This broadened view elevates compensation from a mere payout mechanism to part of the company’s holistic operating system. See his thoughts on this in the clip below:

Ultimately, the way you define the comp role's responsibility is the difference between creating a comp plan that pays and one that steers.

Here are a few tips on how to apply Kaleb’s “behavior architecture” lens at your org...

1. Start every plan cycle not with a rate card, but with a behavioral brief:

• What behaviors are we trying to increase?
• What behaviors are we trying to eliminate?
• Where is the org currently “rewarding friction” (e.g., discounts, internal handoffs, sandbagging, deal hoarding)?

2. Set a plan clarity checklist (and don’t compromise on it):

• Can a rep explain how they get paid in under a minute?
• Can a manager coach on the plan without a comp analyst in the room?
• Can Finance defend the economics without endless caveats?

3. Ensure you treat cross-functional input as a design requirement, not a checkbox.

• Kaleb’s repeatedly shared that comp sits at the end as the output of the GTM system. So if product, pricing, sales motion, RevOps, or support are misaligned, the comp plan quickly becomes a band-aid for upstream ambiguity (which you’ll feel downstream as confusion, exceptions, disputes, and “quick-fix” pressure to change the plan).
• Coherent upstream logic (that you facilitate cross-functionally) is what makes comp stable, explainable, and executable at scale. Ensure you're eliminating silos from the start and briding the gaps.

When the sales comp plan gets blamed — don’t defend, diagnose.

Something else Kaleb urges his team to focus on is not treating comp plan complaints as annoying noise. Instead, he treats these as signal. While the complaints are often imperfectly or reactively communicated and emotionally delivered, they're still inherently valuable.

As he shared: the comp plan is rarely the root cause of a given problem. It’s often the symptom amplifier. It’s where every upstream flaw becomes visible.

So when you hear “the plan's broken,” Kaleb recommends asking a more powerful question to get the conversation out of subjective frustration:

“What specific behavior or outcome are we concerned about?”

From there, run the 'Five Why's'. And don't do this in a vacuum. Talk to other sales leaders, RevOps, and partners directly—because identifying a pattern across functions is diagnosis versus just one person's concern or anecdote.

What this looks like in practice (steal this at your org):

1. Convert every comp complaint into a case file:

• Who is bringing this to attention (role/segment/tenure)?
• What behavior is changing as a result of the plan right now (pipeline generation, deal cycle, discounting, churn risk)?
• What upstream constraint might be causing the issue (territory imbalance, segmentation shifts, product readiness, enablement gaps)?

2. Present leadership with cause-and-effect in plain language:

• For example: We've identified a territory imbalance → it's leading to missed targets → meaning lower earnings → resulting in poor seller sentiment → leading to employee attrition → we're dealing with coverage gaps → company is experiencing missed revenue.
• Ultimately, you need to make it impossible to “rate-increase” your way out of a structural problem. Kaleb’s point here is sharp: paying people more doesn’t fix that they don’t have enough opportunity to hit target.

Beware of perfecting comp plans with AI while ignoring the foundations

When musing on the future of AI in sales compensation, Kaleb’s take was is refreshingly grounded. He’s not convinced AI is taking sales comp roles anytime soon, nor is he dazzled by the idea of an “AI-designed comp plan.” In fact, he warns leaders about the potential trap.

That is—AI can no doubt help you design a mathematically perfect plan, but that plan can still fail in the real world. See more in the clip here:

His point is that the biggest mistakes won’t actually come from AI being incorrect about the logic of the comp plan. The misfires will come from leaders using AI to optimize the most visible lever (comp) instead of addressing what’s structurally unclear upstream: the aforementioned segmentation gaps, messy role definitions, mismatched sales motions, and volatile territories.

Kaleb draws a critical distinction that should become a mantra for comp and RevOps teams:

• AI is an accelerator. It is not a foundation.

If you accelerate a broken system, you don’t get a better outcome—you just get faster issues. So it's essential that you have your house in order with the right systems and data in place before you attempt to go fast with an AI assist.

He also makes another subtle but strategic claim: comp teams need a seat earlier in the GTM lifecycle. If the comp team is only brought in at the end—after GTM design is “done”—you risk building an operating model you literally can’t execute in payouts, governance, or reporting.

For more on his takes around AI, here's Kaleb + Nabeil on how AI is changing GTM roles and how comp teams can augment the work:

Ultimately, there's a lot of AI talk about automation in sales comp, but Kaleb makes a strategic argument. AI is increasing volatility in GTM role design, and therefore comp teams that are downstream will spend their lives re-planning if they're not careful. The winners will be comp teams that become system designers. The teams using AI to move faster, embracing it for the right tasks (not to outsource their thinking entirely).

‍What “winning with AI in comp” looks like based on this take.

In the near future, you should be using AI to augment speed in areas like:

• Identifying patterns and opportunities in your comp plan based on historical data
• scenario modeling and sensitivity testing
• drafting plan language and edge-case identification
• summarizing rep feedback themes at scale

But you'll want to keep humans accountable for the hard parts AI can’t own, such as:

• judgments on fairness
• role clarity and governance
• cross-functional tradeoffs
• change management and maintaining trust

You can’t design “fair and effective” comp without addressing performance variability

In the 'Mythbusters' segment of the show, when asked about a myth he sees too often, Kaleb shared he's spent a good deal of time drawing leadership's attention to the underlying issue of performance variability.

He sees the common executive illusion (i.e. that modeling sales comp on the average rep is fine, so the system is fine), but explains exactly why this is so dangerous; if performance relies on a small number of exceptional reps carrying the number, you have what appears like health on paper—but is actually super fragile.

Unlike the typical inclination here, Kaleb advocates for bringing a more statistical narrative to leadership—without drowning anyone in data.

For this, he triangulates three measures:

• 1) Average performance: broad direction
• 2) Median performance: what the “typical” rep experiences
• 3) Standard deviation: how sustainable performance is (and how concentrated your risk is)

These three measures in combination create a powerful executive narrative because they connect variability to outcomes execs care about, namely: churn risk, forecasting whiplash, and sudden “mystery quarters” that feel like the business fell off a cliff.

Because comp teams are often asked to “make it fair” through plan mechanics, Kaleb’s point is a critical reframing. Fairness isn't a math exercise, it’s a systems one. If opportunity distribution is uneven, the plan can be internally consistent and still feel unjust. It's important sales compensation leaders bring in the statistical narrative to help execs understand how variability is a factor.

The modern comp leader? They're a strong systems operator with a knack for narrative

What comes through most clearly in this conversation is that Kaleb prioritizes building durable alignment: between strategy, GTM design, seller experience, and economic outcomes.

As he sums up, your leverage grows when you can consistently diagnose root causes thanks to signals you're getting, plus translate complexity into cause-and-effect stories executives can act on.

And let's not forget, designing comp as a stabilizing, holistic system—not a quarterly patch.

Check out the full episode for how often the answer isn’t a comp tweak, but a systems correction upstream.

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